fiber
Sugar: THE BITTER TRUTH
Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin. Recorded on 05/26/2009.
He is so well spoken, and his work is very impactful!
Are they? Depends how many you eat.
You think this obese monkey was eating raspberries? They probably got into a human garbage. Get real.
Do you think being fat didn’t happen to any humans or animals before the invention of processed food?
People have spoken a lot about how digestible the sugars are, but in terms of overall healthiness, the fibre is an important component even beyond its impact on sugar absorption. Many people do not get enough fibre in their diets.
Fiber. Fiber helps you feel full, so it is harder to over-eat fruit in comparison with chocolate bars, gummy bears, or even fruit juice.
How the sugar is packaged is also important. Standard white sugar is refined to be easier to digest - less gets pooped out. Fruits and berries sugar is (mostly) fructose with fibers and other elements. In the mouth fructose tastes equally sweet but the stomach has more troubles digesting it and converting it into usable energy. So you absorb way less and poop out way more.
Sugar - sucrose - is split into frutose and glucose in the stomach. your whole thesis is not how digestion works. Frucose is processed in the liver, but all other claims are something I’ve never seen real science back up
Fruits tend to get listed as low GI supporting the poster’s statement.
Also, you’re simplifying the chemistry and metabolic pathways to the point they sound the same when they’re obviously different. I’m not an expert but I as I understand it table sugar is short chain and good to go, fruits (if they’re not pre cooked) tend to be a bit more complicated and have a few more steps along the way (and I assume each requires some energy to unlock and also result in some chemical energy that isn’t completely digested). Also, what you’re saying goes a lot against what I understand from the carb count on the packet from fibre vs. what your body unlocks. That said, I’m very ignorant and far from an expert
Fiber makes a big difference with fruit. it slows down absorbtion on often sugars are locked in fiber needing time.
Glucose affects the gi it is absorbed directly into the bloodstream. Futose cannot be used directly and so the liver processes it - no gi index applies.
Sucrose generally implies no fiber and so the simplification works fine. With the added constraint that only half of the molecule is glucose and influences the gi index.
that is as far as I know things so I need to stop. Even then I’ll stand corrected if an expert weighs in (though it is more likely the ‘expert’ is self proclaimed and really knows less than me so I place a high burdon of proff for correcting me despite this not being where I’m an expert)
What specifically in the original post did you have issue with? There’s not a lot too that post, and you have agreed with part of it, so it seems like it would be faster to list out the issues
1st: they are NOT healthy. You just never eat berries in such amounts as you consume sugar in confectionery things.
2nd: there are many different types of sweet substances. Some are worse like sugar, others are safer like fructose.I don’t think no 1 is a valid argument as that applies to all food
Fructose is the element in sugar that actually taste sweet, it is also the part that is unhealthy. it acts somewhat like alcohol.
Giving similar problems and can also cause dependency.Glucose by itself tastes sweet
Glucose by itself is also very unhealthy
Fructose is twice as sweet as Glucose, and while we do use Glucose for energy the same is not true for fructose, and fructose is way way more harmful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SweetnessSure, but the fact remains that glucose is sweet.
Unless you have FLD the vast majority of metabolic damage is from persistently elevated blood glucose. There is no dietary requirement for exogenous glucose in our food.
So is 100g of fructose worse then 100g of glucose? Sure, but glucose is still quite bad and abundant in most people’s diets.
There is no dietary requirement for exogenous glucose in our food.
This is true, we can make all the glucose we need without eating any sugar at all.
glucose is still quite bad
True.
I don’t remember the concrete names of the substances; my point was that there is a variety of them and they react differently in the body.
You made 2 false claims, and now you say you don’t actually know what you are talking about.
Yes, I kind of figured that out already.
All that sugar is bound up in fiber, making it slower to release and keeping it from spiking your blood sugar into pre-diabeetus. Grind that same fruit down (juice), destroy its fibers, and now you got diabetes in a can.
Whole fruits are pretty healthy in reasonable moderation
if you gorge on 3 boxes of grapes you’re still gonna have smashed through over a thousand calories
The big caveat is fruit juices which remove all the fiber that makes you feel full, particularly anything concentrated.
At that point you’re getting closer to a soft drink than fruit (though you’ll still at least get the vitamins)
Because sugar isn’t unhealthy in the first place, you’ll die without any sugar.
While there are essential fats and proteins, there are no essential sugars. Your body can work perfectly fine indefinitely without any sugars of any kind.
They’re probably thinking about glucose, which is the sugar in “blood sugar”. You’ll die without it, but it’s created endogenously in the liver and kidneys.
Most obtuse comment thus far.
Whole fruits are a treat that can be tolerated by a healthy person in very moderate quantities. Think about the quantities you would get if you went out physically picking fruit off of a tree. So not a big bowl of easy to consume fruit from the grocery store, but when you put the physical effort in… It’s ok
There is no essential nutrition in fruit, historically, the role of fruit was as a fattening device before winter. An opportunistic caloric boon.
The biggest argument in favor of citrus fruits is there vitamin c. In the modern dietary context with really high blood glucose levels there is competition for the natural vitamin c pathway, the glut4 receptor. Citrus, by virtue of flooding the body of vitamin c, gets enough vitamin c into these cells and wins the competition with the blood glucose levels.
Tldr: whole fruit is a sometimes treat, but it does not contribute to your health.
I couldn’t be more wrong if I tried
I’ll grant you my position is unpopular, but I haven’t seen any data indicating it is wrong.
People can, and have, lived long happy lives without any fruit.
People can, and have, lived long happy lives without any fruit.
nobody would argue that
People can, and have, lived long happy lives without any fruit.
nobody would argue that
I couldn’t be more wrong if I tried
Help me understand your position then. What was wrong about my original comment that fruit is a treat best enjoyed in moderation?
The dose makes the poison, really. It’s quite hard to reach a harmful amount of sugar by just eating fruit - you’re likely to get either full or bored with eating fruit before you start reaching unhealthy levels of sugar. Combine this with fruits and berries generally being a good source of dietary fiber, this makes for a good combination of attributes you want in healthy food.
There was some guy on telly did a test. Half the group had to eat oranges. The other half had to drink orange juice. Then swapped them over the next day. I can’t remember the exact setup but i think it was like ‘eat/drink as much as you want, stop when you feel full’.
Everyone was able to consume far, far more calories in juice form and probably far more sugar than they needed.
I think like even eating enough oranges for 1x300ml glass was hard for many people to do in fruit form. Basically, the rest of the orange filled them up and that’s what we’re better evolved for: slower digestion of a more varied mush and lots of fibre and stuff like that.
The juice is far too easy for us to eat way more than needed.
Juice being bad doesn’t necessarily make the whole fruit good. The glycemic index still has to be considered in the context of the person and their diet.
You’re just another shill for big juice, Pulptastic.
/s in case it’s not obvious
Sorry, to clear it up I’m team juice very bad fruit occasionally.
There is sugar, absolutely. And that’s probably where most of the calories come from. But there is also water, cellulose (fiber), and vitamins/minerals - doesn’t have much non-sugar caloric value to change that balance, but it’s still important. And nobody serious is suggesting you eat only fruit, so you can get non-sugar calories from other sources and it can be balanced in the big picture.
It’s kind of like an appropriate amount of dressing on a salad, the good outweighs the bad and makes you more likely to actually eat that nutrition-positive food.
Source: I’m some guy on the Internet. You can trust me.
nobody serious is suggesting you eat only fruit
I thought about that as I wrote it! I stand by what I said.
So where’s does he claim to only eat fruit?
Are you confusing it with him recommending to use Apple?Also the man was insane. If you based on false beliefs make decisions against professional advice, that are detrimental to your well being, and even put your life in danger, that is AFAIK a very key aspect of being insane.
He was someone who was a fruititarian at various points in his life. He was also someone who didn’t shower at certain points in his life. And he went for alternative medicine when he got sick.
OK, that only confirms to me that he was in fact insane. There is no way we are supposed to eat only fruit, it simply doesn’t provide any real energy, but consumes as much to digest as it yields, meaning there is no way to survive on fruit alone.
He chose to not listen to medical advice for cancer and instead dragged things out with ‘alternative medicine’ long enough that real medical treatment wouldn’t be successful anymore but still pulled strings to get a transplant.
He was nuts.
He’s also responsible for getting the ball rolling on enshittification. When you could connect an ipod to a computer, the files were scattered to a billon random places, and you were FORCED to have itunes.
Now, every single fucking thing has to come with their own app. fuck this.
My ex- decided to become a fruititarian, with hopes of becoming a breathitarian someday after reading about a yogi who allegedly had done so.
Emphasis on the ex-.
Notorious for having lived a long life…
56 is long if you were born around 1901
I’m pretty sure Jobs either didn’t die at 56 or wasn’t born around 1901.
around
Maybe ± 70 years.
Is it? I always thought lower life expectancies were dragged down by infant mortality. Basically if you survive the crib you’d likely live into your 70s.
Yeah, that’s what my dad says, and he’s a medieval historian, so I believe him. I guess it’s possible that lifespan in 1901 was much shorter than the middle ages, but that seems unlikely
When referring to diseases, yeah, but there was also a lot of death from wars and other violence, severe injuries from dangerous labor, and labor was pretty risky. If one was healthy and avoided injury they were certainly on par with modern life spans.
1/2 bottle of Ranch an appropriate amount?
For the first half of the meal, yes.
Are you both from the US? It was rough getting used to how much you all like to drown out the food with various sauces
It’s called: “Fatland”.
Source: I’m some guy on the Internet. You can trust me.
With the amount of AI slop out there, in this day and age this is actually a surprisingly high level of trust.
Admittedly when I wrote that I had moments like “cellulose is in fruit, right? And that’s fiber?” and when I googled with neutral terms I mostly trusted Google’s AI slop 🤣
Healthy is relative. A handful of fruit is generally fine. Eating a few pounds of grapes in a day is probably a bad choice. There’s also a lot of people that conflate fruit with things that have fruit in them as about the same.
Eating a few pounds of grapes in a day is probably a bad choice
I have IBS and since grapes are FODMAPs (in high quantities) I should only eat like a handful at a time otherwise they can cause uncomfortable stomach cramping and diarrhea for me 😔
